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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24487303">(the earth is solid) you can dig it up or you can pave it over</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/'>Anonymous</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Aftermath of spy conditioning, Angst and Fluff, Baking, Clint Barton &amp; Natasha Romanov Friendship, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dehumanization, Natasha Romanov &amp; Tony Stark Friendship, Natasha Romanov Has Issues, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, POV Natasha Romanov, canon ignored thoroughly, dash of Tony Stark recovering from trauma, no honestly my knowledge of this fandom is absorbed through fic and tumblr osmosis</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 08:02:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,794</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24487303</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>or, The Art of Openness and Making Ways for Restructuring...</p><p>(let's write about the infamous monster line, and what it feels like, being out of the belief system you were thoroughly inculcated into, and having self-hating tendencies linked in with how that dominated your worldview and how the vague general one absorbed to displace it isn't always so helpful or accurate either)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Bruce Banner/Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton &amp; Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton &amp; Phil Coulson &amp; Natasha Romanov</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Anonymous</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>(the earth is solid) you can dig it up or you can pave it over</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>The MCU. It's inescapable if you hang around enough in general fandom spaces. Thing is... at some level I resent it and most of the notion of superheroes. And yet, watching the trailer for Black Widow sometime back— I'm tempted to actually go see a whole such film for the first time because I...am a sucker for Soviet/Russian spy-ish content.</p><p>Title from Maxïmo Park's "Sandblasted and Set Free"</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Natasha Romanov had not been quite able to breathe nice and smoothly, the first time someone in America had had to explain the idea of My Fair Lady ("well, it's Pygmalion, is what it was called") to her. She'd rushed out into the night ("nice women don't go out walking at night" <em>lest they risk being raped, robbed, or worse.</em>) and channeled the nervous energy into striding down the street with an illusory purpose, given there wasn't a handy spot to go say, climb a tree, or actually run. (Hawkeye said she'd like parcour. She couldn't seem to break her conditioning, in the city, enough to do it well or enjoy it.)</p><p>...Bruce Banner had it easy, had a monster side and a human side, and the human side was appropriately afraid of what the monster could do (and if the Monster was gentle, Black Widow knew how to feign kindness too; when Tony Stark, in an unguarded moment, hazarded that perhaps doing kindness was being kind, she had fallen silent.)</p><p>They had taken Natasha (Who <em>was</em> Natasha, before that? Under it? ...without it?) and made of her not so much a proper lady as an unfeeling automaton capable of acting like one. They made her forget or bury or burn out whatever she had been, as a child. </p><p>And they had taken every vestige of humanity, down to the propensity to make children, which in her brittle understanding was meant to be the drive of the species. What sort of monster lacked even base drives? What sort of simulacrum of a <em>woman</em> would never and could never be a mother? (There was something a little...off in that, pieces that did not fit together, one that didn't fit in, but she was determined she only lacked the trick of it, like in reassembling a gun.)</p><p>It was very confusing, in Natasha's opinion, to say a mythical substance damned one to a half-life. (She wasn't all that great, at this point, with metaphor she hadn't woven together herself, whether under instruction or not; with myth that wandered too broadly from truth and left her with unintended riddles.) She and Tony were working their way through Harry Potter and the <strike>Sorcerer's</strike> Philosopher's Stone, under the advice of Phil ("some children's fantasy could benefit you both"), is how it came up. But even once told it most certainly wasn't the exponential decay concept, she failed to grasp "half-life", mostly tempted to apply it to the Jekyll-and-Hyde of Bruce Banner. Clint (who was not reading along with them but had just watched the movie), though, told her, reluctantly, it was what she was living.</p><p>Did this a half-life make? The inability to voluntarily unwind her watchspring, the compulsion to be certain she played the role, to "a T", even when that role was just "a woman"? ...the other effects that she watched roll by like an afternoon thunderhead out in Clint's home territory (tornado country), too scared to witness and acknowledge them head on (too unsettled, a monster stricken still by the fullness of its monstrosity)? </p><p>...Bruce knew monstrosity. She was also asking a lot, foisting hers off onto him as well, but he made sense and (even the monster...the Hulk is kind, enough, to Black Widow) was granted by life an evener temperament than she.</p>
<hr/><p>Phil said it to Tony first, only Natasha wasn't entirely clear on what "it" was, except that it involved sad little monsters under the bed, a confusing juxtaposition. She knew there weren't monsters under beds, really (and unlike the women on TV, unlike a proper Woman, Natasha has been in enough shabby, infested places, that most crawling things lurking in dark places trigger only an interest in disposing of them. It would take something like a few hundred roaches to make her so much as exclaim in surprise. But, then again, she's seen farm women, refugee women, even women on city streets who didn't seem afraid of mice or spiders, even if it seems like an abstract data point.) but certainly the traditional narrative didn't involve their being <em>sad</em>?</p><p>Instead of clearing it up, Clint insists they go to Phil's movie night with Tony, to watch "Monsters Inc.", "as in incorporated", and Nat prepares to watch a narrative about genocidal maniacs or probably at least killer animals. The sight of blood, of violence, doesn't affect her, as such (and it's so stupid there's popular wisdom about women fainting at the sight of blood?!), but there's something grating, even chilling for her about making up a story about it and expecting it to be ...enjoyed. Phil would probably have a whole what Clint calls a spiel about how that reaction is somehow a good sign, but it doesn't feel good or acceptable or normal; it feels like she's the alien.</p><p>And for a few moments she thinks the movie is about aliens, although it helps assuage her other concerns that the movie is animated. Tony has made (<em>has made</em>) oatmeal-cherry-chocolate chunk cookies, which apparently was a suggestion (the making the cookies, not the variety) from Phil. Although saltier than usual (he made an error, he says), they're good. She wonders if Phil would be assigning her tasks like that if she showed signs of more compliance, but she doesn't like showing herself compliant in her downtime, even if that affects badly her relationship with her handler. </p><p>Anyway, it turns out the monsters are clueless ...but kind, and Natasha gets a strange lump in her throat that feels kind of like tears, not precisely from the story, but with the point she thinks Phil was trying to make in metaphor. <em>If you just shift from scaring the children to making them laugh, then you could...</em></p><p>...once upon a time (as they say here in America) Nat would have jumped into action. But Nat now is not the precisely conditioned servant, despite still being the monster, and she (it?) doesn't want to work as a clown, doesn't want to ...feel the pain that would come with hearing constant laughs while barely able to laugh yourself, afflicted with a chronic melancholia of being. And they say some clowns are sad, and some childish rage bursts out, at the idea that sadness is worthy of mockery, and she kicks the trashcan. Not a proper attack, just... just trying to get a little frustration out.</p><p>She hears Phil perfectly well, but doesn't quite process what he says, at first, <em>distracted</em> by feelings. "I think maybe you'd benefit from making something different in the kitchen," he says. Oh. Yes, the kitchen. Also a place for women and not monsters, and it's a strange and lazy sort of monster she's being right now, rebelling against a handler who <em>wasn't part of her conditioning and has proved to have their best interests in mind time and again.</em></p><p>And he signs something to Clint, she can see out of the corner of her eye, but she doesn't look to see what it is, and she thinks for just a moment that he, that these men who have mostly been nothing but friendly to her, want ...the woman out, and giving up monstrosity is giving up on the parallelled camaraderie of brotherhood too...</p><p>"You like cinnamon rolls, right?" Clint asks. <em>Clint. Hawkeye.</em> Isn't going to just up and abandon Nat. They've seen each other at just about their worsts. </p><p>So she grits out "Yes."</p><p>"You can punch the dough, and it helps." Hawkeye says. <em>Punch out the dough</em>. Maybe that was part of their reasoning, instead? Her racing thoughts relent to pause, hanging on whatever will be said next.</p><p>Phil starts in with his full-on therapist mode:  "And you get something tasty, and physically, even psychologically nourishing out of it, instead of a mess and having to make apologies and stuff. You don't have to if you don't want to, but trying to express your frustrations, even physically, is something I'd like you to do, and if you end up with something constructive at the end of it, so much the better."</p><p>"You don't want me to make people laugh?" Nat asks, flatly, because knowing expectations, and not beating around the bush, as they say, feels vitally important. </p><p>To his credit, he apparently quickly calculates much of her train of thought. "What I wanted you to get from that movie is, rather, that sometimes the things and the people we view as monsters, as threats, actually have more to their nature than that. Maybe it was a little heavy handed for that message, but I'd like you to be exposed to more ideas about monstrousness. It might help with dealing with how you conceptualize yourself right now."</p><p>"You might like baking," Tony cut in. "I want to have older people teach me something and maybe treat me like distant family, only I ...don't like being completely clueless, so Phil made me a course in basic cookie making."</p><p>"I want... I think to actually be a woman," she proposed, warily, and knew it wasn't quite right as soon as she said it. Phil wanted Tony to express his desires that were more emotional, but he wanted Natasha to actually express any desire at all, because she seemed devoid of them, and it was probably the process she had been through.</p><p>"Nat," Clint put in gently, "I'm not sure that's something we--or anyone else, can help you with. That's going to be about how you feel." It looks as if he wants to continue but isn't quite sure how he would.</p><p>Then Tony adds, "Uh. In the nicest possible way, if you don't feel like a woman, maybe you aren't one."</p><p>"'A human he is, and his name Anakin,'" Phil interjects, in a strange and high pitched voice. After a moment, he says, "I'd like to talk about how you mean you think you want to be a woman, and maybe how much of that might be similar to 'I want to feel like a human.' But for right now you could go bake some cinnamon rolls with Clint."</p><p>The strange thing about it, about making an "enriched bread dough", is the fact that she can't bring herself to punch and be violent with it. It goes from sticky to silky with flour to a sort of round and elastic finish that recollects the expression about babies' bums and it smells like home somehow, but she works it with only a meditative vigor, quickly picking up kneading technique. </p><p>And for what seems like a terribly fragile moment, even the thought of babies doesn't send her crashing into despair or guilt at how she won't and can't have one. For a brief few minutes, she feels something like... content there with her friend.</p>
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